1. Field
The present application relates to a data processing method and a data processing device for processing input data information, and more particularly relates to a data processing method and a data processing device which enable reversible processing by which the volume of data can be reduced efficiently with as little degradation to the original state of data as possible when data of an image, sound, logic, control, and so on which are compressed for transmission or the like are reconstructed.
2. Description of the Related Art
Currently, an image of one screen represented on a display with, for example, 600 vertical dots and 400 horizontal dots in an electronic apparatus such as a personal computer has an enormous total data amount of 600×400×2563, given that 1 dot on the screen has 24-bit color information. When such an image is transmitted via communication means such as the Internet, CPU processing for processing the vast amount of data takes time, and a large amount of memory resource is consumed. Thus, there are techniques for reducing the volume of data by compressing data of the original image in various formats.
As one of such compression techniques, for example, JPEG (Joint Photographic coding Experts Group), GIF (Graphics Interchange Format), and so on are widely used, as described in International Publication No. 2004/56084 or the like. The JPEG format is such that image data are converted into a frequency, and when such frequency data are quantized, high-frequency components having a low amount of data compared to low-frequency components become 0 by quantization, and the overall data volume is compressed by this amount. Further, in the GIF format, an image is scanned line by line in a horizontal direction, and portions in which the same color is repeated are grouped, thereby achieving compression of the total data volume.
In conventional compression methods enabling various types of reversible compression, such as the aforementioned JPEG format and GIF format, degradation of image occurs more than a little when the compressed data are reconstructed, due to noise generated in data compression, compression exceeding supported color number, extraction of portions with the same attribute in a predetermined range, and so on. Accordingly, there is desired a capability of reducing the data volume of an image with as little degradation of the original image as possible, and studies aiming at further improvement in precision and compression rate are conducted every day with these compression methods.
The present inventor was astonished by a study in a previously released paper (J. Neuroscience vol. 19 p. 8036-8042, Reconstruction of Natural Scenes from Ensemble Responses in the Lateral Geniculate Nucleus, 1999) such that an animal sees an image of a “flower” or the like seen through the visual cortex while keeping the original shape by beautifully turning the flower into a tree form via in-brain processing. This is an image obtained by checking 177 neurons in the visual cortex with a tester and reconstructing them. In this brain, processing of information of the image and so on is performed efficiently through respective layers of neurons formed of a multi-layer structure.
Accordingly, the present inventor has completed a novel image processing form and processing method resembling brain synapses by which the volume of data can be reduced with little degradation of the original image by applying a processing mode of information obtained from visual perception in a brain and using this mode with computer technology.
Therefore, a proposition of the present application is to provide a data processing method and a processing circuit including a data processing device which both enable reversible processing by which the volume of data of an image, sound, logic, control, and so on can be reduced efficiently and significantly with as little degradation to the original state of the data as possible when the data are reconstructed.